Appunti intero esame di Cultura e Letteratura Inglese 2 - Prof.ssa Polopoli

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(portrayed as superficial, egotistical and self-satisfied): her point of view was radical and

anti-conformist, even more in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

But this anti-conformism was a characteristic of all three Brontë sisters. Their major novels

were all published in 1847, under masculine pseudonyms: Anne’s Angres Grey, Charlotte’s

Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Their mother had died when they were little, and

they were brought up by their father in a village in Yorkshire surrounded by a landscape of

factories and workshops… And of Chartism. They were well-aware of labour struggles and

the working-class radicalism thanks to their father, who openly spoke about political and

social matters with his daughters.

Charlotte Brontë

The heroine of Jane Eyre, Charlotte’s masterpiece, is also a governess; she, an orphan, is

first a pupil and then a teacher at Lowood Asylum, and then becomes governess at

Thornfield Hall, a sinister mansion which recalls the mysterious castles of the Gothic novel.

Her pupil is Adèle Varens, Edward Rochester’s illegitimate daughter; Rochester’s an

ambiguous and mysterious figure, part villain, part Byronic hero, who has locked his crazy

wife Bertha in an apartment on the top floor. He’s not insensible to Jane’s charm, that of a

woman who’s not beautiful, but has a passionate streak – it is she, who declares her love

for him, but when (on the eve of the wedding ceremony) she learns that he is married, she

refuses to marry him, fleeing Thornfield Hall and being rescued by Reverend St. John Rivers

and his sisters. The Reverend proposes marriage, but she does not love him, desire him

and feel desired by him, turning down his proposal. However, she’s ‘religiously’ blackmailed

by him, and almost yields – in that moment, she feels some sort of electric shock and

Rochester’s voice calling her (typical elements of the Gothic romance, just like the ghost of

Jane’s uncle, the mysterious atmosphere of Thornfield Hall, the menacing presence of

Bertha…). The supernatural is not, then, vehicle of terror, but of reconciliation: Jane (who’s

inherited from her uncle) makes her way to Thornfield Hall, where Rochester is now blind

and maimed, having failed to put out a fire started by Bertha, who perished – she declares

her love for him and marries him. Jane’s character is modern, she’s an independent woman

who’s not afraid of declaring her feelings – however, her character might also be seen as

almost masochistic, self-immolating. Others said that she’s calculating, in marrying a man

who is maimed and blind: his disability lets her have him all for herself, with no risk of losing

him or being obliged to submit to his will. But at the time this was probably the only way of

marrying a man like Rochester for a woman of her social class, while remaining

independent. For the reader of the time, the most extraordinary and innovative aspect of the

novel would have been the courageous affirmation of identity and female independence that

Jane embodies.

By comparison with Anne, Charlotte was more inclined to imagine an attempted class

reconciliation, shown in Jane’s marriage to Rochester but also in Shirley, her next novel,

set during the Luddite rebellion. However, she was no less decisive in proclaiming the right

of women to free self-expression.

Emily Brontë

The only novel by Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, defies any attempt to categorisation: in

certain aspects it is a Gothic novel that evokes the atmosphere of German Sturm und Drang

and of Byron’s Child Harold, but in other aspects it is a novel of surprising modernity, both

in the way it treats relations between the sexes and in its narrative technique. In fact,

Wuthering Heights has a Chinese-box type of narrative structure – it doesn’t unfold in a

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linear fashion, but it contains time shifts and flashbacks and is told from different viewpoints.

The principal narrators are Mr Lockwood and Mrs Dean, servant to the Earnshaw family in

the property of Wuthering Heights, a place characterised by the presence of a ghost and for

its wild atmosphere; they try to unfold the mystery surrounding the place. Catherine

Earnshaw felt a fellow feeling with Heathcliff’s ‘wild’ side, but she rejects him as social inferior

when he proposes to her, marrying instead the rich Mr Linton; Heathcliff becomes then a

Byronic hero, a terrible avenger whose anger goes against the Earnshaw and Linton

families, and whose fury will follow Catherine until her deathbed. You might say that Cathy’s

voice was the most reasonable one: Mr Linton was a good husband, while Heathcliff would

have been a master – but that’s Mrs Dean’s point of view, who’s not objective at all in her

judgement of him. Heathcliff’s love, however, remains present inside him, even after Cathy’s

death, so that his only desire is to find his union with Cathy in death. Heathcliff is the

incarnation of the savage forces we contain inside ourselves, and Cathy, too, has shared in

this ‘wild’ part of his nature, to the point that, before dying, she cries out ‘I am Heathcliff’. In

this figure of a woman, Emily Brontë has conceived what in the Victorian world was

inconceivable.

George Eliot (1819-1880) – per name of Mary Anne Evans

George Eliot was the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, collaborator on the radical

Westminster Review, literary critic, translator, and novelist. For a long time, she’s been

considered the high point of the Victorian novel. Her major novels have a richness of

characters, episodes and events similar to those that we find in the works of Thackeray and

Dickens, but what is distinctive with her is the attention she devotes to individual aspects of

daily life and the number of elements making up the existence of human beings. She gives

great attention to the psychology of characters and their inner truth, and she demonstrates

a great ability to probe the emotional reasons, hidden thoughts, secret preoccupations and

motivations of her characters.

Domestic realism marked her novels: art as a necessary commitment to the real. She was

a novelist of the past and Victorian age is largely absent from her fiction. Her aesthetic of

realism is based on the scientific method, observation and experiments. She’s a

positivist: this means she looks at reality with a scientific point of view, and the novelist is

just like a ‘surgeon’.

Dickens and Eliot are polar opposites: Dickens is the great popular entertainer; George Eliot,

on the contrary, was the voice of the higher culture – she was complexed, a great intellectual,

a positivist who accepted scientific laws to explain the universe. This also means that she

rejected supernatural explanations of reality. She observes society in a very scientific way,

and believes in the influence of the environment on the individual. By analysing history in a

scientific way, she finds laws and explanations.

She observes a period far from the present because for her, distance is important in order

to achieve realism and objectivity. The search for coherence and stability inside the self

becomes an important task for her, because she analyses the individual when he’s

confronted with the raptures and discontinuities of the world.

Her most popular novel is The Mill and the Floss (1860); the central character is Maggie

Tulliver, whose imagination, vivacity and intelligence are experienced, in the provincial

environment she lives in, as an offence: she’s a rebel, whose social condemnation is sealed

when she accepts the advances of her cousin’s betrothed. The flight of the lovers

compromises her reputation, and she is driven from home by her brother, who risks his own

life during a flood; in that occasion, she tries to save her brother, but fails, not before

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reconciling with him. Through her adventures, the novel portraits critically the attitude of

Victorian society towards childhood and women, and it owes much to the author’s personal

experience. She portrays superbly the British countryside, but also the rural communities,

still tied to an agricultural economy but already undermined by the Industrial Revolution.

Her masterpiece, however, is Middlemarch, which is also set in a provincial location. It is

endowed with a political urgency due to the second Reform Bill, and she sees the advances

of the time as positive. The novel traces the destiny of a number of couples who live in close

proximity, but the unity of the four narratives is provided by the figure of the protagonist,

Dorothea Brooke, a wealthy orphan and a person of strong puritanical principles, who

marries an older man. She slowly becomes aware of the spiritual aridity and meanness of

her husband; her marital experience and the one of Dr Lydgate enable Eliot to speak about

the importance of dialogue between spouses. The problem was not only one of restrictive

principles and customs: it also had a legal dimension, because a woman’s right to hold

property was strictly limited by the law. In fact, after her husband’s death, Dorothea must

give up any claim to the property of her dead husband in order to marry his cousin.

George Eliot does not put forward radical solutions: she relies on the power of her

description of the existent, counting on this to point out the way to necessary change.

Anthony Trollope

His success at the time was enormous and even today, at least in Britain, he remains quite

a popular writer. Trollope has a relatively optimistic vision of Victorian reality: he thinks it has

many defects which need to be attended to, but his critique never acquires a radical edge,

and always assumes that society will correct itself. The exception is The Way We Live Now,

a bitter satire on ‘the commercial profligacy of the age’, which denounces the falsity and

corruption that rule in the world of finance.

Among his production, the ‘Barchester Novels’ and the ‘Palliser Novels’ are particularly

worth noting: the latter offer an impressive portrait of parliamentary political society in the

Victorian period, with an overall ironic tone regarding human weaknesses (even though

pessimism sometimes prevails); the first ones, on the other hand, are a study of domestic

relationships against the backdrop of a small-town community, and he touches quite

different themes, just like private matters and questions of society and religions.

His success was mainly due to his characteristic description of the provincial world, in which

little dramas never become tragedies and negative characters are never rea